Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [47]
But the shah’s Bahamian idyll didn’t last long. Peloquin got a call from the office of Prime Minister Lynden Oscar Pindling of the Bahamas, who had gone out of his way to admit the shah into the country. Pindling wanted to meet the shah, and Peloquin said he’d arrange it.
“The liaison guy from the state department was a perfect jerk,” Peloquin recalls. The department wouldn’t allow the shah to meet with the prime minister. Why? “The State Department guy said, ‘I don’t think the shah would be interested in meeting with a Negro prime minister.’” Peloquin knew that was nonsense. He didn’t know if the shah was a racist or not, but he did know that the shah—who was dependent on American help—would meet with anyone the United States told him to. The State Department was throwing up roadblocks that didn’t need to be there. The Bahamian prime minister, who had been the first black premier of the British colony, was offended by the crude rejection. “Two days later, they expelled the shah from the Bahamas,” Peloquin says.
Back in Washington, Intertel’s business was taking off, and a parade of prominent citizens with odd problems began marching through the doors. One visitor, Henry Ford, the grandson of the legendary automaker, sent Peloquin’s secretary into a frenzy of preparations, shining the wooden office doors in anticipation of the great man’s arrival. Ford was opening a casino on the Caribbean island of Saint Martin. He told Peloquin that he’d asked the head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, for advice, and Hoover had recommended Intertel. Intertel men were soon running background checks on every one of Ford’s new casino employees, making sure that no one with known Mafia ties was hired.
On another occasion the Washington super-lawyer Edward Bennett Williams walked into the Intertel office on Seventeenth Street with two clients in tow: the publisher of the Washington Post, Katherine Graham, and its editor, Ben Bradlee. They were in the middle of the high-stakes drama of Watergate, breaking story after story about corruption at the White House. They worried that Nixon’s men were bugging their offices. Peloquin dispatched a team to sweep Graham and Bradlee’s offices, finding no evidence of eavesdropping.
From the early 1970s on, Howard Hughes came to depend ever more on Intertel. When Clifford Irving announced that he had cowritten an autobiography of Hughes to be published by McGraw-Hill, Intertel got the case. Irving was a fraud: Hughes had never granted permission for an autobiography. And he certainly had not received compensation for selling his life story, as the publishing house was claiming. Irving’s interviews, documents, and anecdotes were either made up or lifted from other media accounts of Hughes’s colorful life.*
“Chester Davis said, ‘this is pure bullshit,’” Peloquin recalls. “The Hughes people were up in arms about it, because Hughes himself was up in arms about it. The author was a wacko.”
Allegations that the book was a fake erupted in the media in January 1972. The Hughes organization called a meeting in a hotel conference room in Hollywood with seven reporters who had known Howard Hughes in the days before he’d become a hermit. Peloquin recalls that the reporters quizzed Hughes over a phone line especially piped in for the remote press conference. Do you know this guy? they asked. Hughes denied it.
For the moment, Hughes was as charming as ever. “I only wish I was still in the movie business,” the disembodied voice said over the phone line. “Because I don’t remember any script as wild or as stretching the imagination as this yarn has turned out to be.”8
But that wasn’t enough to derail the book. Hughes needed definitive proof.
To prove the book was a hoax, Peloquin set up a meeting with his former colleagues at the criminal division of the Department of Justice. He told officials there that Hughes had no intention of paying any taxes on the hundreds of thousands